Tuesday 3 September 2024: Hello, September!

Ah, September! The start of my annual work schedule, which probably harks back to school and college days when the new term started in September. I don’t have an academic diary now, but I do still have an annual diary that starts in January. 

It didn’t matter that I was raving busy yesterday and had a lot of catching up to do. That still didn’t stop me falling down a dark hole and staying there for the rest of the day. And part of this morning too.

I’ve moved CATCH THE RAINBOW forward to give it a chance to be ready in advance of 24 November this year. Regardless of if it’s ready or not, it’s also going in the July 2025 issue of WORDS WORTH READING. So I have to get a move on and finish this story that’s been hanging around for a good 20 years.

There are some who’d say if it’s been lingering for that long, then perhaps it doesn’t want to be written. But it’s almost finished. That’s the ridiculous part. There’s some dark stuff I still need to plan and write and then mingle it all in, but the main storyline is pretty much done.

Before I settled down to it, though, there were 2 things I still wanted to do:

1. Get all of my notes and printouts down from the top of the poet’s wardrobe

2. Come up with a cover I’m happy with

Getting the notes down isn’t as easy as it sounds because they’re in a big plastic box with a load of other stuff, and the box is very, very heavy. Last time I wanted something out of it I had to gradually empty it onto the bed until I could actually lift the thing down. And when I filled it back up again, the poet almost did himself a mischief getting it back up there.

So, getting my notes and printouts isn’t as easy as it might seem.

I always like a cover of my story before I start. If there’s a person on the cover, then I can write them into the story. If there’s another item on the cover, then I can build that in too. But so far, despite playing with covers for a good many years, there still wasn’t one I was happy with.

And then yesterday I had a dabble in AI generated art. (Don’t groan! It’s only to get me going!) There are loads and loads of image generators out there, many of which are quite expensive, in my view (£20+ a month is VERY expensive). There are free ones that give you so many credits a day and they still want you to log in. And then there are forever free ones.

So I had a play with as many as I could, although I couldn’t get into some of the premium ones without handing over my bank details first. I didn’t bother with those. 

The absolute best free AI text-to-image generator I found was (cough! cough!) MS Designer. I’ve just stepped away from most things MS, so the last thing I wanted was to find something else to replace it with. But it really is the best one for interpreting what I was asking for. BUT…you only get so many credits a day, AND…it can’t be used for commercial purposes. 

Which is fine, because I’d far rather use a real artist’s work *before* I resort to anything artificial on my book covers. BUT…it was Microsoft and I didn’t want to get too comfortable. PLUS…I can play around with these things all day so a limited number of images would only get my mad up.

By far the worse was one I downloaded locally to the Mac. It’s easy to use, it’s completely free, you don’t have to sign up, and you work on it locally or online. But it was rubbish. Complete and absolute rubbish.

However, when I discovered that Canva has an image generator via its Magic Studio (I think), that was it. I was hooked. And once I knew what to ask it for, I was away.

I didn’t only need one book cover, though. CATCH THE RAINBOW is the 5^th book in a series that I’m writing backwards, so it’s really Book 1 and the others will be prequels rather than sequels. And that means I needed 5 covers to keep them all looking the same. 

After a bit of playing, the first one was easy, but I couldn’t get any of the others to look as nice and vibrant. So I added a rainbow and, voomf! Done. I changed the name of the series from THE CIDER CHRONICLES to THE RAINBOW CHRONICLES, and endeavoured to include significant rainbows throughout the series.

After I’d put it all away I remembered I’d also need an omnibus cover. And then I remembered that I probably won’t be using AI generated art on my book covers (although you can’t 100% guarantee that those on the stock image sites aren’t AI), unless I really, really can’t find alternatives. And I stopped worrying about it. For now.

EDIT: A pal later told me that he uses MS Bing, so I had a play on there too – where commercial use is possible. Once I got the hang of it, this was very easy to do. However, it’s also incredibly scary what AI can do already. And I don’t think it’s going to go away.

Hello, September!

I also did some planning for the month ahead, and here’s how it’s looking:

• new month word-count & progress spreadsheets for September
• monthly schedule planning for September (deferred from August)
• newsletter
• CATCH THE RAINBOW
• 12 STORIES IN 12 MONTHS
• newsletter
• 5 stories over 4 weeks (inc. 12 STORIES)
• client edit: Taliban book 
• client edit: Holocaust book
• (week) daily blog post
• weekly tech scan
• weekly backup
• weekly diary work
• Monkey Dust admin
• Diane’s gig list admin every Thursday
• dental appointment
• 3 hospital appointments (dermatology allergy testing)
• hair appointment
• Monkey Dust gig 
• monthly schedule planning for October
• restart PROJECT MANAGEMENT FOR WRITERS: GATE 3 (on the last day of the month)
• Restart THE SECRET OF WHITEHORSE FARM (also on the last day of the month)
• advance finances for November

How’s your September looking?